The Internet has become an increasingly important platform for advertising. On the Internet, advertisements are typically displayed as combinations of images and text displayed in a specified region of a user's browser window. As in many other forms of mass media, the advertising host (e.g., an online service provider or web site owner) is able to derive income by enabling advertising. Advertising hosts are therefore motivated by profit to attract advertisers.
In the Internet context, advertising income is sometimes used by hosts to offset the costs associated with providing content and/or services to users, enabling those hosts to provide content and/or services for free or at a low cost to users. Low cost or free content and service may result in increased usage and corresponding increases in the circulation of the advertisements. Increased circulation makes Internet advertising increasingly effective and valuable for the advertiser.
A metric used in the advertising business is an “impression,” which is defined as a single display of a given advertisement in a manner perceivable to an observer. A metric used in the online advertising business space is “screen real estate,” which is the area on a web page, defined by parameters such as size and location, that may be used to display different items, such as advertisements, to create impressions. The term “ad space” is used to refer to the “screen real estate” that is devoted to advertising. A web page may include multiple ad spaces. Each ad space on each web page may be identified by a unique identifier, such as a number.
FIG. 12 illustrates an exemplary screen shot 1200 of a browser window 1202 displaying a web page containing an example of an online advertisement 1204. This particular screen shot shows a portion of the website belonging to The Washington Post. An online advertisement 1204 appears as a banner near the bottom of the screen. In the screen shot 1200 of FIG. 12, ad space data related to the advertisement 1204 may indicate that the advertisement 1204 is a relatively narrow horizontal strip that does not use the full width of the page, and/or that the advertisement 1204 appears near the bottom of the page. Other advertisements may be positioned at different locations on the screen. They may use either the entire height and width of the page, or possibly some portion of the height and the width, leaving the remainder of the screen real estate to display other advertisements or information related to the subject of the web site.
Advertisers frequently try to “target” advertisements to specific demographic groups that are likely to respond favorably to the advertisement (e.g., buy the product being advertised). Typically, a favored method of targeted marketing involves determining whether a given audience includes good candidates for a given advertisement based on demographic data, such as age, gender, profession, and income level.
Another factor typically used in deciding which advertisements should be employed is adherence to a set of advertisement presentation guidelines known as “business rules.” Business rules are designed to increase the likelihood that a user will be exposed to a given advertisement at a desired frequency and in conditions that are conducive to responding to the ad. For example, business rules might be used to ensure not only a minimal exposure level but also a maximum exposure level because overexposure can be detrimental to the effectiveness of the advertisement. An example of a business rule could be the following: “Advertisement X will be displayed to a user no less than once and no more than three times in any 24-hour period.”
“Ad inventory” is a set of advertisements available for a given ad space. For example, if a specific ad space is located on a web page discussing personal computer devices, then advertisers for computer equipment, consumer electronics devices, and long-distance telephone service might all provide a set of advertisements to be displayed to this audience. Thus, in this example, the ad inventory on a personal computing web page might includes at least three different types of advertisements from three separate advertisers.
The objective of the advertiser is to maximize the exposure of the product or service being advertised to the desired audiences, given the cost constraints of the advertiser's budget (i.e., how much the advertiser can afford to pay to the advertising host in return for displaying the advertisements). Toward this end, the advertiser often will provide requirements to the advertising host. For example, an advertiser may require that an advertisement be displayed only at specific times of day, or only at specific positions on the computer screens of the users. The advertiser also may require that its advertisements be displayed a minimum number of times within a defined time period, thus generating a desired number of impressions. Typically, an advertiser purchases a specific number of impressions, for example, in quantities of one thousand, so that their advertisement is displayed in a specific ad space that number of times over a given time period.
There are several criteria pertaining to advertising that affect the price of advertisement (i.e., how much revenue is generated by the advertising host in return for its display of a given advertisement) and the satisfaction of the client. These may include: 1) the size of the advertisement; 2) the placement of the advertisement within the screen; 3) the number of times the advertisement is displayed; and 4) the time(s) of day that the advertisement is displayed. These criteria must be taken into account by the advertising host.
Advertising hosts have used both demographic data and business rules to help make their services and/or sites attractive to advertisers. This is primarily accomplished through the use of relational databases that store demographic data and advertising usage statistics. Advertising hosts typically use software to run various algorithms and queries to determine which advertisements should be displayed based on the demographic data and advertising usage statistics stored in the databases.
Historically, it has been necessary to continuously update the basic technology used to drive a relational database to account for increases in database size, a necessary incident to increases in the usage of online services and the Internet. Furthermore, the sheer size of the databases has made their use cumbersome and inefficient.
More recent systems for coordinating advertisement configurations and business rules for advertising purposes have generally used large relational databases that are accessed by servers, hereinafter referred to as ad display servers. A typical procedure entails the compilation of a large data file called a configuration file, which is uploaded into the ad display server on a periodic basis (perhaps daily). This file contains all the pertinent information needed for delivery of advertisements for the next period (i.e., until a new configuration file would be generated and uploaded). This information typically includes all of the new advertisements (any advertisements which previously had been displayed would already be present within the relational database), configuration information needed to display the advertisement in the correct ad space, statistical data from the previous period impacting the application of the business rules (e.g., how many times was some specific impression shown the previous day), and updates to demographic data (e.g., data about new subscribers).